Hosts: We are actively seeking hosts in all of the regions listed below. Please contact us at acfregionals2016@gmail.com. Bidding is open until November 8th. If you serve a different region than the ones listed but still think you could attract teams and run a viable site, please feel free to bid anyway.

Any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2014 is required to submit a packet.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT Division I or Division II SCT, NAQT ICT, and typical academic invitationals and summer opens count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Trash or “hybrid” tournaments, College Bowl/HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT “Invitational Series” questions do not.

The submission schedule for this tournament is as follows:

The submission schedule for this tournament is:November 28th, 2015: -$50 December 12th, 2015: -$25December 26th, 2015: No penaltyJanuary 2nd, 2016: +$25January 9th, 2016: +$50After that, +$10 for each additional day that you're late.After January 16th, 2016: Dropped from the tournament. No exceptions.

Please submit your packet to acfregionals2016@gmail.com. The actual e-mail with the attached packet should have a subject-line reading: School + Team Letter (if applicable) PACKET". In order to meet a deadline, you must submit your packet before 11:59 PM Pacific Time on that date.

Accessibility:

This year we are making a concerted effort to make ACF Regionals a more accessible tournament. To this end, we are making the following changes:

- At least 50% of tossup answers should be things that can be tossed up at ACF Fall. This does not mean that you write an ACF Fall-style tossup. Your tossup should still be a "regular-difficulty tossup on an easy answer-line". - For the remaining 50% of questions, stick to solid regular-difficulty answer-lines, and don't push the envelope. - Easy parts for bonuses should be genuinely easy, once again along ACF Fall lines.- While hard parts should still be "regular-difficulty" hard parts, you are encouraged to ask about deep things connecting to easy material, rather than piggy-backing on upper canon answer-lines. For examples of the encouraged approach to bonus hard parts, please see the bonuses from PADAWAN.- Tossups are going to be hard-capped at 7 lines. Every tossup will have some text on its seventh line. Please feel free to submit tossups that are longer than 7 lines, but do not submit any tossups that are shorter than 7 lines, or we will send them back to you.

Distribution:

Each packet should contain 24 tossups and 24 bonuses, distributed as follows:

Please consult my updated post above to see the ACF Regionals sites that have been awarded. Hosts should have received an e-mail from me confirming this, earlier this evening.

We are also currently investigating the possibility of a high-school-only mirror. Stay tuned for possible announcements on that front.

We are still actively seeking hosts for a Mid-Atlantic site and a Canadian site. No bids were placed for either of these regions. If there is reason to believe that a separate Pacific Northwest or Texas site is required in addition to the sites at Stanford and University of Central Oklahoma respectively, we are open to that possibility.

John LawrenceYale University '12King's College London '13University of Chicago '19

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

I've updated the packet list above to show all those whose packets were received by the -$50 deadline. Submitters should also have received a confirmation from me. If you think that you sent in a packet, and you're missing a confirmation and/or I forgot to post your name above, please feel free to let me know.

John LawrenceYale University '12King's College London '13University of Chicago '19

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

ThisIsMyUsername wrote:I've updated the packet list above to show all those whose packets were received by the -$50 deadline. Submitters should also have received a confirmation from me. If you think that you sent in a packet, and you're missing a confirmation and/or I forgot to post your name above, please feel free to let me know.

If you sent in a packet, please enter your registration details via this form. It's way easier for me to track your discounts if you have registered.

Schools do not automatically receive bids for ACF Nationals as a reward for hosting ACF Regionals. Host schools have two ways of qualifying for ACF Nationals: (1) They can play a house team, which will qualify like all other teams, according to their performance. These house teams do not need to write packets. (2) They can apply to ACF to receive a “host bid” for a specific roster of four players. Those players’ performances will be reviewed by an ACF committee to judge if a “host bid” should be rewarded. It is expected that schools that receive a “host bid” will not subsequently front their submitted roster as a house team for ACF Regionals. This bid is granted specifically so that those players may staff the tournament. There is a maximum of one “host bid” per school. Additional teams from the school may qualify for ACF Nationals. by playing as house teams.

These standards likewise apply to non-host schools that have editors working on the tournament.

John LawrenceYale University '12King's College London '13University of Chicago '19

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

This is a reminder that any team that needs to submit a packet to play ACF Regionals 2016 must submit one by Saturday night (January 16th), or they will be cut from the field. There will be no exceptions.

John LawrenceYale University '12King's College London '13University of Chicago '19

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

I'm a little delinquent with sending out the invoices. I am in India on an emergency visit and I do not have the time to enter/update the invoices just now. I'll start sending out the invoices by the 22nd and will try to finish by the 24th.

2. You guys didn't provide a link to the Texas/Louisiana site. Wait, the forum page doesn't exist? This is the least surprising thing ever.

3. Given (2) and the fact that only two teams from our region turned in packets, I can only wonder if this field has enough teams for the tournament to exist. Does the tournament have at least four teams? If so, can ACF inform us and keep a field update somewhere? If not, what should we do?

(4) is more of a series of hypothetical questions that I'm not sure if ACF has considered yet, given that the qualification procedures are relatively new. So, I'll ask them.

4. In the case that the Texas/Louisiana (or any) site doesn't have four teams, what happens? In our case, there is no site within 400 miles, Nashville being the closest. Would we be eligible to qualify for a bid for ACF Nationals without going to the nearest non-TX/LA site given that the deadline to apply for such bids has passed? What would ACF's Nationals packet submission guidelines be for teams whose nearest site has dissolved but have submitted for Regionals? Would they be different in any way?

Sorry for the slow reply. I’ve been in contact with other people at ACF about these problems.

It is the duty of the hosts to post announcements for their site and to provide field updates. I’m not sure why Texas A&M didn’t. Subsequent to Jake’s post, I e-mailed to ask them to announce their site, but they have neither replied to my e-mail nor responded by posting yet. Hopefully we will hear from them soon.

Thus far UL Lafayette and Rice are the only teams listed for the Texas A&M site, and Minnesota’s house team is the only team listed for the Minnesota site. Whether or not to cancel these sites is at the discretion of the host schools.

If you all decide to go through with the tournament anyway, and the sites continue to have fewer than four teams, the winning team will not automatically qualify for ACF Nationals. But its A-value will be calculated, and if it is high enough, the team will still qualify by statistics. Stephen Eltinge will probably be posting sometime soon with a more detailed recap of A-value qualification.

John LawrenceYale University '12King's College London '13University of Chicago '19

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

Here's that post! Most of the of the qualification process is substantially similar to the way things worked last year as outlined here and here; I've highlighted important changes.

ACF Nationals Qualification

1) Clubs who are hosting ACF Regionals were eligible to apply for one automatic host bid, as explained in this thread. The teams who received bids (listed here) must submit a packet for ACF Nationals by the no penalty deadline on March 10, 2016 in order to maintain their bid. Clubs are responsible for making necessary arrangements to properly staff their ACF Regionals events in the event that they play house teams for any reason, including but not limited to host bids being denied or seeking to qualify a second team. Playing or qualifying additional teams at Regionals has no impact on the host bid decision or status. However, the team members listed in the bid roster may not play Regionals; experienced players should be used as tournament staffers.

1a) Clubs with an ACF Regionals editor who are not hosting a tournament site and clubs that are more than 400 miles from the nearest Regionals site were eligible to apply for an automatic bid through the same process.

2) Any team that wins an ACF Regionals tournament at which at least four total teams from at least two total schools are present will receive an automatic bid.

3) Any team that wins the Undergraduate title at an ACF Regionals tournament at which at least four total Undergraduate teams from at least two total schools are present will receive an automatic bid.

4) All remaining teams [including all teams at sites which do not produce an outright qualifier by (2)] are ranked on their “A-value.” The formula for the A-value is described below. All such teams will be asked to provisionally accept or decline a hypothetical Nationals bid [new this year], and then actual Nationals bids will be issued to accepting teams in descending order of A-value until the field fills or all Regionals-playing teams have been invited.

A-value Calculation

The A-value is based on NAQT’s D-value outlined here, with the following changes:

The TPPTH_opp factor will be computed using only games not involving the team whose A-value is being computed. For example, consider a four-team Regionals site with teams A, B, C, and D. To compute TPPTH_opp for team A, compute the average TPPTH scored by B only in its games against C and D, by C against B and D, and by D against B and C. Average these values together, weighting by the number of times that A played each of B, C, and D, to obtain the TPPTH_opp for A.

A minimum value for the strength of schedule (“SOS”) factor will be set at 0.8. If TPPTH_opp/TPPTH_field for any team is less than 0.8, that team will be assigned an SOS of 0.8.

Since there is not a separate “Division II,” the DC_T and DC_B correction factors will not be used.

As a consequence of the above, “Adjusted PPB” is the same as regular PPB. Furthermore, “Adjusted TPPTH” and “Adjusted BHPTH” are just equal to the SOS times TPPTH and BHPTH, respectively.

All teams that qualify by one of the above procedures must inform ACF of the acceptance of their bid by March 10, 2016. Note that submitting a packet does not constitute bid acceptance or guarantee you a spot in the field—a team that does not qualify at Regionals but plans to play Nationals may submit a packet for an early discount, but their spot in the field will not be guaranteed until it has been offered to them. Furthermore, if you submit a packet before registering for the tournament and subsequently do not attend ACF Nationals, whether because you do not qualify or because you choose not to attend, that packet will be treated as a freelance submission; you may not use those questions for another future packet-submission tournament

If the field does not fill once the bid acceptance deadline is reached, or new spots open based on the packet-submission rules, then any team eligible to play ACF tournaments may attend ACF Nationals on a first-come, first-served basis for the available spots. Packet submission rules will not be waived in any case. Teams who are not packet-exempt are advised to begin writing packets on a contingency basis so that they may claim spots as soon as they become available, if this occurs near a packet deadline. Spots which open up in the two weeks before the tournament may only be filled by teams who have submitted packets on contingency or are not required to write packets.

ThisIsMyUsername wrote:Sorry for the slow reply. I’ve been in contact with other people at ACF about these problems.

It is the duty of the hosts to post announcements for their site and to provide field updates. I’m not sure why Texas A&M didn’t. Subsequent to Jake’s post, I e-mailed to ask them to announce their site, but they have neither replied to my e-mail nor responded by posting yet. Hopefully we will hear from them soon.

Thus far UL Lafayette and Rice are the only teams listed for the Texas A&M site, and Minnesota’s house team is the only team listed for the Minnesota site. Whether or not to cancel these sites is at the discretion of the host schools.

If you all decide to go through with the tournament anyway, and the sites continue to have fewer than four teams, the winning team will not automatically qualify for ACF Nationals. But its A-value will be calculated, and if it is high enough, the team will still qualify by statistics. Stephen Eltinge will probably be posting sometime soon with a more detailed recap of A-value qualification.

Thanks for the response. Is there any way you can post the fields for the Vanderbilt and New College sites?

We will not have trophies for ACF Regionals this year. I apologize for this; my lack of coordination is to blame. I just did not have enough time to put in the orders for our trophy vendor that would have given them enough time to ship the trophies to their appropriate destination.

I am requesting all TDs to make arrangements for book prizes in lieu of trophies. I will follow up with all TDs via email to make sure they are aware of this.